


Concerning Hobbits

by blackhorseandthecherrytree



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-06
Updated: 2013-03-06
Packaged: 2017-12-04 11:00:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/710048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackhorseandthecherrytree/pseuds/blackhorseandthecherrytree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>musing on the nature of Remy/Rogue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Concerning Hobbits

Disclaimer: I don't own X-men. or Rogue. or Gambit.

* * *

He and Rogue weren't made for stability. They're a firestorm, destroying whatever they pass, and a day never goes by that ain't flint to tinder. He don't know how the others put up with all their nonsense.   
  
Sometimes, though, when he looks at her - and she looks at him - and they work together - he sees what they could be. They could spin the world round whichever way they wanted, if they could just balance in the middle of the storm.   
  
Other days, he don't know what the hell's goin' on in her fool head and couldn't care less. (even if he knows she's so beat up by loneliness she don't even dare-)  
  
(-maybe that's why he always comes back to her. The shape of their respective loneliness is the same: her not daring to touch and him not daring to trust)  
  
She and he are the only piece of home the other has in a world long, wide and weary. She is sunshine and sweet tea and bougainvillea growing on the patio to him; he thinks he's cigarettes and spice and all the boys next door to her. Whatever else Mystique did to her, she did give her that (before training her to fight her war, for which he isn’t entirely ungrateful; it’s saved all their lives hundreds of times, and made her the woman he knows).  
  
They speak in dares and wagers, mainly because he’s forgotten how to give without upping the ante or getting something back. It’s something she must have learned here, and something he knows better than to learn at all.   
  
(some lessons you can’t unscar)  
  
She can take his world away in a kiss, and that doesn't frighten him one bit. He doesn’t worry about her draining him, not when he knows that he'll be there with her when she leaves and when she returns and when she finally walks away. Not when he knows that all his secrets can be laid bare without him having to admit a thing. And she, she'll hold them for him a while.   
  
(if she would just give him hers, the things she holds more than skin, he would hold those for her too)  
  
He knows about the boy she first kissed, about how he’s still in a coma. He knows about her Mama Mystique and her Mama Irene and the mama and papa she don’t rightly remember at all. He knows that once upon a time she would have done anything for Mystique, and thought the same would be done for her. He knows that Carol knocking sense into her is the only reason she’s here, and that absorbing her made her want to live for more than her mother’s cause.  
  
(he doesn’t know like she does, but he’s always had a big imagination)  
  
But none of that matters. What matters is the here, and the now, and the this. Living in Xavier’s mansion, teaching the kids how to grow up without fear, cooking jumbalaya and making her smile when he ain’t makin’ her angry. He’s a fool for love, and so be it. He don’t know how to be any other way.  
  
She’s playing with the children, carefully covered as always. His heart bleeds for her, because he knows that she would have wanted them if things had been different. She would have wanted the house and the family and the friends and the life that she could have had. Her heart is bound up in simple things.  
  
(a blanket he can fold around her shoulders to hold her and tell her things will be all right in the morning)  
  
“Now what in the blazes are you doing just standin’ there, Cajun? Can’t you see I’m outnumbered by these hooligans?”  
  
His mouth quirks up into an involuntary smile. “Now why would I do that, cherie? Seems like you got ‘dem all well in hand.”  
  
“Oh, and you think that just because I can throw Wolverine across a room –“ she scoops up all five giggling children in her steady arms – “and because I can fly circles around Storm whenever I feel like it –“ she floats inches above the ground, which makes all the kids only cling to her harder – “that I don’t want you around?”  
  
“Well, if it’s a question of wanting you be asking,” and he bounds over the couch to her, to be near, “I be more than willin’ for a little piggyback ride.”  
  
She rolls her eyes. One of the girls points out to him snobbishly that he’s too old for piggyback rides.   
  
All is well. 


End file.
